The national board of the NAACP decided last Saturday to endorse the resolution passed at its general convention, calling for a halt to charter expansion until charters meet the same standards of accountability and transparency as public schools. This was a reasonable decision. It was not anti-charter, it was pro-accountability. It was a responsible decision, made with great courage; after all, both the New York Times and the Washington Post had written editorials urging the board to reject the resolution passed by its general convention last summer and to protect the freedom of charters to ignore accountability, cherrypick students, kick out students with low scores, and live by different standards from those imposed on public schools that accept all students.
Some in the charter advocacy sector responded with rage and attacked the NAACP, even though it is the nation’s most important civil rights organization. It is absurd for charter advocates to say they are fighting for civil rights, then to trash the organization that has been fighting for civil rights for over a century.
Peter Greene writes here about the response of some leaders of the charter industry. They belittled the NAACP for its decision, instead of listening and paying attention to what it actually said. This is the same disrespect that whites have shown to blacks for centuries in this country. At least, read their resolution and think about it before denouncing the NAACP or charging that it was bought by the teachers’ unions. At least, give the board and the members the respect of assuming they acted from experience and conviction, not from nefarious motives.
Greene writes:
If I had to guess (and, of course, I do), I’d say the freak-outery is that this is a PR set-back. The charter movement depends a lot on the ability of the rich white guys pushing charters to be able to gesture at some Actual Black Persons who support charters and agree that charters are the best thing that white folks have ever done for them. This whole holleration is not about policy or politics, but instead centers on their bastard child, PR optics.
It may be simpler than that. Many of the charter backers are in it to make money. A moratorium on launching new charters would hurt their bottom line, and they are simply businessmen who have hit an obstacle to expanding their business revenue. It’s PR perhaps with a side of money-grubbing.
But charter fans do have options here. They could, instead of arguing that the NAACP can be dismissed because they are now ignorant dupes, actually listen to what they’re saying.
I say this as someone on the Support Public Ed side of the debate, where many of us really blew it in the early stages by suggesting that support for charters among parents of color was only happening because they had been misinformed and duped. But they weren’t. They were responding to what looked like the best available solution to the problem of underfunded, under-resourced, just generally crappy poor schools.
The lesson for some of us? It’s a mistake to dismiss someone’s concerns just because you disagree with their method of addressing those concerns. If someone comes running out of a building wearing a tin hat and shouting, “I’m wearing this tin hat because the building is on fire,” discussing the anti-fire efficacy of tin hats is useful, but denying the flames shooting out of windows is not.
So if charter fans were smart, they would look at things like the NAACP resolution and say, “Well, we clearly have some problems that need to be addressed, because these folks are certainly responding to something that they see going on.” They could look at this as something more than a lost skirmish in a PR battle, but an opportunity to gather some actual information.
Or Allen and her posse can keep trying to write off the NAACP as a group of ignorant dupes, blame it all on the teachers’ union, and keep wondering why, even though they’ve thrown away their tin hats, everything feels so very warm.
Diane Ravitch's blog 